bloated user count

Since LL stopped charging for intial basic accounts a few months ago, SL's user count has increased a lot. I was talking to someone who said LL doesn't cross-reference different addresses with the same credit card. Why? Only ONE credit card should be linked to ONE address. It's bad enough alternate accouts are counted towards the user account, as it is, but allowing different addresses for the same credit card is just stupid and possibly fradulent! I even heard there is cell phone validation now but kids pop out of the womb with cell phones, practically, so what protection against minors is that??

Active Worlds had bloated user ("citizen" counts too and it was ridiculously inaccurate and misleading. SL should NOT follow the same path or it could face legal trouble...

getem killer!

really tho account bloat? i dont walk into mc donalds becuase the sign says billions and billions served, credit card billing adresses? i have one now that has 2 of them on it.. one is a biz address the other is home, same card, same account (its one of those dual use things)

cell phones yea theres the chance jimmy got on the adult grid using his celphone in dads name... most of the time tho in contract situations the minors name is on the agreement with a co-signer

I know two bloated users.

I knew I couldn't escape mention in this thread the minute I read the title.

How does having a perhaps misleadingly high registered users value toted about and held up for display harm us common folk?

Surely potential investors know better than to believe such advertising puffery.

It is not unusual to have two addresses on a credit card, that is a way to get some places to ship to your work address, for instance, which can be real useful if you are never home to sign for a delivery because you are always at work. I'm not sure if that was what Eep was meaning, though, he might have been talking about something more LL related than that.

I'm not sure it's that bloated. There's been a lot more 'registered users', than appear on the front page (about 300,000 'registered').

Well, go ahead, finish.

How many and when, and is the figure on the web page a cumulative total or something like the total number ever registered minus the ones who cancelled their accounts and ones who had accounts cancelled through inactivity?

If it is supposed to be a cumulative total of people who ever became users then it shouldn't go down ever, right, barring of course possible time travel or parallel universe involvement?

Considering that the number inworld remains steady between 3000 and 5000 most of the time, out of a supposed playerbase of 140,000 ..... I'd say isn't anything positive. What are the other 135,000 players doing?

Lewis

i own four accounts. so do each of you.

I do not own four accounts.

When I said people above, I did actually mean accounts, not people.

I just have one account.

Lewis

The inworld number doesn't stay the same it has slowly been increasing for months.
A couple of months back we couldn't even reach 5k on a log-a-thon. Right now that is a number that is reached reguraly.

I think the front page is:
= All Accounts Active before free accounts + All new free accounts

However, Lawrence has stated on multiple occasions that it's being 'tweaked' to match the accurate number over time (that is, he's adding/not-adding accounts over a period of time to bring it to an accurate count eventually)

That all being said, Cory has said that of the front page figure '90% have logged in at least once in the last 3 months'

thanks, noob

Not at all, I am able to achieve all I do with one account, don't need 'self referrals' and stipend farming to achieve any goals, and certainly don't need to create alts just to troll these forums - if I have something to say, I have the courage to say it with my real identity instead of hiding.

Lewis

First of all, who CARES whether or not the numbers are correct, jesus, sometimes it's like you people own the damn place.
I thought we had already gone through this discussion before and Linden had stated that those accounts were all that logged in for the past month?
The number does drop on occasion. Get rid of dwell and stipends, and it will drop even more, as the money farmers will be forced to get a job

The other 135000 players are not logged on 'on that moment of time'.

If an average person spends 4 hours a day in SL (I think the AVERAGE is less than this), and there are (AVERAGE) 4000 ppl online at any given moment, that means 6 x 4000 people in the game on a day, that is, 24 000.

Sounds like a not too small city population! But if the average hours online per day is 3 hrs, it comes down to 32 000 people online over a day.

These are just guesses, though. To get a more precise approximate number, we'd need:
- average time per person spent in SL per day (like the 3 or 4 hours i just guessed)
- average number of people online at a any given time in a day (like the 4000 number)

Could we get those numbers? Yes, I think so.
- Average number of people online: easy, just make a script, which saves data every 5 minutes of how many ppl are online, for a week. Then average out the data.

- Average time per person: this is harder. I'm not a pro in statistics... But I'd say something like: let's ask about 100 or 200 ppl in SL how much time they spend online per day (or per week, doesn't matter which). Though this has risks, too, maybe they can under or over guess it, etc. But I think 100 or 200 ppl would be enough to have an average number.

Once we have these, we'd have a pretty good approximate.
The only joke is, Linden Labs has the precise number in their hands, so it would be less work if they would just give that number out

I am not sure, what you mean by "bloated" exactly or why you consider it dangerous, to publish this number. Could you elaborate on this question a bit?

As I understand it, the Residents number on SLs home page gives the number of users which logged on in a certain time period. (It is not "all the users that ever filled out the registration form"!)

And as such it gives at least a hint of SLs population size - even if many of these virtual people will probably leave SL soon. Some of them might be alts. That is true. But after asking around a bit I found out that most residents are rather open with the fact that the have an alt or not. And I found out that most "casual users" rarely use alts. Those who are doing business in SL are more likely to have alts (if only to fill up a business related group with the required three members), but all in all the "alt problem" might be smaller than feared by some here on the forums.

But even, if the avarage user had two accounts ... where would be the problem?

But it does not. The number of concurrent users online on a given time of day grows at a rate of 15% - 20% per month.

And the number of concurrent users online is not equivalent to "active residents", as Zonax already pointed out - simply because most residents do not spend all of their day in SL.

According to publicly available data the vast majority of the users of MMOGs spends less then 20 hours a week "inworld" (and a week has 168 hours). My estimate for the number of "active residents" is in the area of 30,000 - 40,000. The rest are "casual users" probably, many of whom will leave SL after a while; and "alts" of course, too.

Obviously *I* care, Eggy. I'm sure advertisers care too. If a previous discussion on this topic resulted in a Linden saying accounts that logged in for the past month (1), then that conflicts with what Adam Zaius said Cory Linden stated:


And THAT is why you, Eggy, and everyone else, should care. If LL is changing the timeframe when to count a user, and not stating that statistic with the user count, that is misleading, false advertising, and possibly fraudulent...

The problem is, Pham, that alts should not be counted as UNIQUE users. Active Worlds suffers from this same exact problem--as every online multiuser app probably does. I know 3 people who EACH have at least 3 alts (1 has 6). People who create alt accounts should be required to register those accounts to a main account, and if an alt is given to someone, that person should be verified individually and uniquely separate from the previous alt account owner, and the alt account changed to a unique account.

I know that it is your opinion that these things should not be possible or the processes should be changed in the way you indicated, Eep ...

I was just asking, why ... you think this should happen or why it is so bad if nothing changes and the numbers are published like they are today.

See my [post=904211]reply[/post] to Eggy for why...

But I did.

And I have to say that I fail to see "misleading, false advertising, and possibly fraudulent..." behaviour on the Lindens side. No one is lying about the meaning of this number on the homepage to the best of my knowledge. If I were an advertiser - which I am sometimes in First Life - and a publication is citing data about their readership I usually ask how this is measured. There are some standards in the industry (offline and online) to measure eyeballs.

If someone would quote a number without using a standard term for it, I would ask very careful how the numbers are calculated. The answer to that question might become "part of the contract".

There are other forms of advertising where I don't get any guarantees about the audience. As far as I know, LL is not making any guarantees about audience size with the only form of advertising they sell, the Classifieds. So there is nothing that could be "misleading, false advertising, and possibly fraudulent..."

Any nonwritten assumptions about the meaning of a number on the homepage surely will not be part of the contract.

Eep, in what way are users being defrauded?

I understand they might be being mislead but that is not the same as being defrauded.

It would be nice to have several sets of numbers, such as the total number of accounts created, the "human" count, to the best of LL's ability to determine it,

Changing a statistics's definition when and as needed so it shows the numerical result you want doesn't sound too good, does it? It somehow reminds me vaguely of my time in chemistry lab.

I think it's fairly obvious that the percentage for the last month should be different from the last 3 months, since the population isn't static. Some people leave, some people arrive.
And... what advertisers?